Today, I was all set to produce a Dictation tutorial video showing people how to use Dragon Naturally Speaking 9  with  Excel.  Murphy’s law came into play and Dragon Naturally Speaking refused to work with Excel.

No matter what I did, I couldn’t get the dictation or voice recognition to work at all.

I did some searching, going through help and my Dragon Naturally Speaking manuals and books.  Ultimately, I found the answer on a thread talking about the problem at SpeechComputing.com.  A former DNS programmer offered up what seemed to be a good description of the problem and the technical fix.

As regards why you could not dictate into an Excel spreadsheet, the Dragon log indicates that DNS attempted to load the Excel ActiveX control, but Windows fail to load it. Loading ActiveX controls is called a “Remote Procedure Call.” You have seen this in other posts as “RPC_Server Unavailable.” What happens is that the RPC server either has not been started or is inaccessible because Windoze burped and failed to launch it or cannot access it. This server controls the loading of ActiveX controls. If you’re running Windows XP Professional or Windows Vista, you can go always go to the Administrative Tools and look under local services for the RPC server. There are 2 entries. All you have to do is stop them and restart them. However, if you do this be sure to restart them in automatic mode vs. manual mode. Otherwise, they may fail to start the next time around. Regardless, if the RPC server stops functioning or is inaccessible for any reason, you will not be able to load ActiveX controls that load on-the-fly as they do in DNS. On the other side of the coin, don’t go looking for the path that is specified in the error (Exception thrown entries). This is a temporary folder and you will not find it because it is emptied (cleared) once the error reporting is completed. The results are stored in the temporary files folder, but they are stored in a manner that is not viewable. 

How do you enter text into Excel 2003 on XP SP2 using DNS Pro 9?

Too Technical of a Fix for Me - Here’s the Low Tech Fix!

Well, I tried that using my own system which runs on XP Media Center and I couldn’t get this to work.  I did find an alternative workaround.

Reboot your PC!

Yeah, it sucks that you have to revert to this step, but if all else fails this did work for me.

The problem seems to be intrinsic to Windows and Excel, but the reality is that this is the program that many people work in and DNS either will work or it will not.  Fortunately if it does not or stops working, then a reboot, should que things up to work once again. 

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If you have worked with the new Dragon Naturally Speaking 9 custom vocabulary beta trial, there is a new update available for your software. 

You may have seen a slight error creep into DNS 9 after utilizing the program that tracks your speech for about 40 hours and then sends a database to Nuance where they create a custom vocabulary for you.  The error takes place when you are trying to make corrections.  I have seen issues where only parts of words are selected such as the last four letters plus the trailing space on a five letter word.

I believe this is the error that the new update will correct.  The old error could be manually corrected by restarting DNS9.

You should be able to get this update the next time you completely restart your machine and start DNS9 or when you simply completely close out DNS9 (even out of the start bar task bar) and restart DNS9.

Its about a 17mb download and install and doesn’t take very long.  Easier than loosing weight eating hoodia roots from Africa.

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I’d like to share with you a very annoying problem that I have not yet been able to solve.  Its technically an Outlook problem, but running Dragon Naturally Speaking prevents me from using the normal Windows fix for this Outlook problem.

Background

Microsoft XP (my OS) has a relatively weak and poor voice recognition engine in it that has nothing to do with Dragon Naturally Speaking.  You can play around with it if you like but it will return a very poor result (about what DNS could do 10 years ago).

The problem is that XP also comes with a text to speech program and it will have your computer talking to you at the most annoying times.

Every time you receive an email, it will state “You have 3 mails” or “You have 10 mails”, as it pulls in the email from your server.  If you have more than 1 email address it will repeat the chant of how many emails it has found on your server(s).  If you have a slow connection, slow server or slow Outlook or a few hundred emails to pull in, it will essentially repeat this annoying chant for each batch of emails (usually about 5 - 15) until all 100 emails come in.  So if you get say 50 emails and 150 more spam mails to your junk folder, you might hear this stupid message 30 times. 

That’s about as annoying as opening up the Wall Street Journal in the morning ignorant to the fact that there is a lingerie ad on the back page surprising your coworkers and putting you in a difficult situation with HR.

Now you can turn this off relatively easily, but if you do so in XP it shuts down the DNS engine in part as well, which serves to cut off your nose to spite your face.

Like I said, I have not yet found a solution to this problem after using both systems together for over a year.  If you have by chance found the solution or a work around I’d love to hear about it and would be happy to reference your solution or your website if you have one.

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